I'm not sure that's my problem. I mean, it outputs the time in the proper format and everything just like this:
${time %I:%M %p - %b %e}. But it doesn't change every minute. It changes every fifteen minutes or so. I think there is another problem here because half the time when I make a change to conky, instead of immediately refreshing to show the changes sometimes it takes a few minutes to make the change. Sometimes it doesn't at all and I have to restart. I would just killall conky and then conky & but for some reason when I do that it refreshing the wrong conky(as I have two)
What I was getting at is try something other than what conky provides. If its a python script you can set execution intervals. But they way your explaining it Idk, I never ran a setup like yours with multiple conky or lua taking care of stuff.